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Amid Statehood Bid, Tensions Simmer in West Bank

Palestinians and Israelis clashed Friday at Qusra, West Bank. Israel has placed thousands more police officers in the West Bank.Credit
Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

QUSRA, West Bank — In this Palestinian village where a mosque was defaced and cars were burned, young men now patrol nightly against settler intruders. Nearby, Jewish settlers worry that Palestinian militants buoyed by international support of their statehood will step up attacks. Settler rapid response teams are practicing with M-16s; women are learning to shoot handguns.

As the Palestinians seek United Nations membership in New York, the situation on the ground remains calm. But tensions lie just below the surface. Israel has stationed thousands more police officers in the West Bank armed with tear gas, noise machines and putrid liquid to stop possible marches on settlements.

The settlers themselves have no training in such crowd-control techniques, and they fear for their communities, some of which reject fences for ideological reasons, arguing that they live in their homeland and will not fence themselves in. So the risk of their using live fire against Palestinians who might try to march on their communities is quite real. In more remote outposts, wooden clubs have been distributed.

“They feel the world is with them, so why not make an innocent march?” asked Shimon Shomron, a former undercover commando who heads the rapid response team of Bat Ayin, a fenceless settlement near Bethlehem known for its radicalism. He stood on a ridge looking at the Palestinian town of Tzurif across the valley, an M-16 across his shoulder. “But they know we will not meet them with flowers.”

For much of the world, the very presence of more than 300,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank amounts to a kind of violent crime. They are holding land widely considered Palestinian by right, obstructing a two-state solution. And they are armed and protected by one of the world’s most powerful militaries.

But geopolitics aside, the question facing security forces — both Palestinian and Israeli — in the coming weeks and months is whether the relative quiet of the past few years is coming to an end. And a wild card in their calculations, they say, is the small group of radical, frightened settlers who have recently attacked both Palestinian villages and an Israeli military base.

“I consider this a major threat,” Yohanan Danino, Israel’s national police chief, said recently of settler violence in announcing a new team of police officers aimed at tracking radical Jews. “Those events are liable to produce an escalation, and that is the last thing we need right now.”

The scale of the threat is a matter of controversy. The radicals, who probably number in the hundreds, promote a policy they call “price tag,” in which they attack Palestinian property — and occasionally the Israeli military — in response to army curbs on their building or other activity. The security forces recently dismantled three of their houses, causing an increase in retaliations. The settler leadership has fiercely condemned “price tag,” saying it does not represent the vast majority of their community. In addition, Israelis say that there are few such episodes, but Palestinians say that they suffer constantly from such settler violence and that lately it has gotten worse.

“Several times a week they break in, and we don’t want them on our land,” said Abdul Hakim Ahmed, a psychology teacher who lives here in Qusra, a village of about 5,000 people near Nablus, and who is one of the organizers of the nightly patrols. He spoke as a dozen young villagers with huge flashlights and cellphones walked Qusra’s perimeter. “They uproot trees, torch cars, steal sheep. We are threatened. They want to drag us into violence as an excuse to take more land.”

Qusra is unusual because it lies outside the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority and relies exclusively on the Israeli military for protection. Its men have no weapons, and Mr. Ahmed says he wants to keep it that way.

“Any violence coming from the Palestinian side will benefit the government and the settlers,” Mr. Ahmed said. “We lost thousands of martyrs in the second intifada and we lost land, too. They labeled us terrorists and they benefited. So now we use different tools — media and diplomacy. We learned this from them.”

Photo

Israeli women learned how to use their husbands' weapons on Thursday at a basketball court in the settlement of Pnei Kedem.Credit
Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

Whether things will stay so benign going forward is unclear. Mr. Ahmed added that the Israeli Army response to the complaints of the villagers has produced few results: “They come, they take notes, they leave. Nothing ever happens.”

The Israeli authorities acknowledge that few violent settlers have been caught or prosecuted. They say they, too, are frustrated by that.

“In the government, we are all very worried about this,” said Benny Begin, a minister in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government who is on the right of the Likud party. “These people are scoundrels, but we have not been terribly successful in catching them.”

The army says it is cracking down on radicals, barring some of them from the West Bank for the coming months.

The settlers contend that they, too, are insufficiently protected by their military. The rising mistrust on both sides and the possibility of their taking the law into their own hands seem most perilous.

West of Hebron is the 70-family settlement of Adora, where in 2002 attackers killed four people, including a 5-year-old girl in her bed. In a recent letter to a volunteer group that supplies and trains defense teams, the settlement said it was worried about what would happen “with the Arabs declaring statehood.” (Settlers rarely use the word “Palestinian,” considering it a term of propaganda.)

The appeal said: “Adora is exposed to many threats, including murderous terrorist infiltrations, shootings on the nearby road from Arab houses and passing vehicles and the organized and coordinated obstruction of the road by the residents of neighboring Arab villages.”

Palestinians call that description a wild exaggeration. But other settlers take it very seriously.

“We have to urgently resupply the security needs of 140 communities,” said Yisrael Danziger, director of operations at Mishmeret Yesha, which trains and supplies the settler response teams beyond what the Israeli military provides. “But we have a long way to go. Once they are told they have a state, the Arabs will feel they have been given the keys to the inn and that we are usurpers. The future is here. What was once terror will now be policy.”

Mr. Danziger is shunned by the settler establishment as a dangerous firebrand, but the response teams praise him. He raises money abroad, mostly in the United States, to buy protective vests, helmets, plastic stocks to stabilize handguns and other equipment that some of the teams say they need because the army has not provided what it should. His group also hires security men to do additional training for rapid response teams in anti-terror actions.

At a recent practice on a military training site in central Israel, Mr. Shomron and the other members of the Bat Ayin security team were taking live target practice and learning to inspect around corners for intruders.

The dozen young men, some bearded, with large skullcaps on their heads and prayer fringes hanging from their sides, said they needed to be prepared for potentially big changes ahead, starting with mass marches by Palestinians.

“If they march, I’m sure they will come with knives or rocks, not with candies,” said Avraham Levine, a 28-year-old member of the team. “This government lets the Arabs do whatever they want. But when a man feels unprotected, he takes the law into his own hands.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 24, 2011, on page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Amid Statehood Bid, Tensions Simmer in West Bank. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe